READINGS:

Letting go is not optional in this life, any more than exhaling is optional to breathing. What we call life is in fact a process of attaching and detaching, going on at every moment. That is the “sweet and secret working of the Spirit” in us. And it takes a lifetime of learning, breathing in and breathing out. ~ Elaine Prevallet

We are the journey itself. Loss and grief are not just dismal places we must unwillingly visit. They are just as much a part of the journey as the places where we feel respite and would tarry. What abides is the invitation to consciousness. The great rhythm of holding on and letting go is outside of our control. What remains within our control is our attitude of willingness to find what remains to be lived. ~James Hollis, Swamplands of the Soul

Be like that bird who, pausing in flight,
Feels the bough give way beneath her feet
And yet sings, knowing that she hath wings. ~ Victor Hugo

SERMON
One of my joys as a UCG Emeritus Minister is leading a Contemplative Prayer group on Wednesday evenings during Lent. Each week this year, we focused on a spiritual practice of awareness: an awareness of Seeing, of Listening, of Generosity, of Grace, and of Letting Go. The evening I mentioned that we would pay attention to letting go during the following week, I heard an audible intake of breath accompanied by some quiet groans. I understand that response; it is often my reaction to the need for letting go. Over time, however, my experiences have led me to reframe letting go as a spiritual practice. As Elaine Prevallet notes, letting go is not optional in this life. It is a constant from the moment we take our first walking steps to the moment we die, so we have ample opportunities to practice it.
This morning my focus is on times when we move from one season of our lives to another. This rhythm of consolidation and then letting go is how we grow. If we see it as a spiritual practice, we can find and hold onto what steadies us, what supports us, in times of change, deepening our spiritual journey as well. Since our worship theme is “Storied,” I am sharing my stories and reflections about three specific things that help me in times of letting go.

1 – Awareness and Attention

In the Hebrew scriptures, Ecclesiastes says: There is an opportune time to do things, a right time for everything: a time for birth and another for death; a time to cry and another to laugh, a time for holding on and a time for letting go ……

Ecclesiastes calls us to awareness of these cycles and rhythms of life. Avoiding or not engaging times that call us to let go just sets us up to repeat the same patterns and behaviors over and again and often we are blindsided later by those unaddressed issues. It is awareness and attention that can steady and ground me as I let go.
My son Matt turned 18 in September of his senior year in high school. He seemed to become the self he had yearned for during his first three high school years. I can visualize him that September, standing confidently and relaxed, with an elbow on the open space above the door of our 1929 Model A Ford. He looks so good, he is doing so well with friends and school, with baseball and the school paper. It is a year with much less of his adolescent tugging and his rolling of the eyes in frustration. He teases me constantly as I point out his last PK Yonge football game, his last youth group ski trip, his last UCG retreat – you know the drill. When he asks one morning if I am going to tell him this is the last time I will make him a turkey sandwich on the first day of April, we both laugh. But I am acutely aware of all these lasts. How suddenly the journey of parenting – which seemed such a long road in those nights of infancy when he didn’t sleep, in those toddler days of random chaos, in those rainy August afternoons when we couldn’t go outside – now seems like the blink of an eye, as our time of living together at home comes to an end.

Our family – grandmothers, aunts, uncles, cousins – gathers at our house on a June evening, along with friends, to celebrate Matt’s graduation joyfully with laughter, stories and hugs. Matt is handsome in his shirt and tie, carrying his blue cap and gown out to the car. We arrive at the University Auditorium; our family finds our seats. The crowd is excited; we are all pumped up with pride. Then the organ surges into the first measures of “Pomp and Circumstance,” and I immediately burst into tears, with a chest as tight as a fist and a heart filled to the brim with poignant love, as the procession of these beautiful, tender young women and men march happily down the aisles.

Summer then leads us to sorting clothes, buying supplies, packing boxes and suitcases, and finally to the long drive to college in North Carolina. Larry, Matt and I spend the night in a motel, poised for the next day’s freshman orientation and the move into the dorm. It goes by like a flash, some parts well, some parts awkwardly. I sense Matt’s nervous anxiety, both his hesitance to let go and his wanting to get on with it – and it mirrors my own.

The moment comes to leave. We walk with Matt across campus to our parked car. And I want, I want so much to go without inflicting my tears on him when I know that he is trying as well to hold it together. So it is a quick good-bye: “call us tomorrow” – hugs – we hop into the car and pull away – with my last glimpse of Matt standing there on the sidewalk, alone. Larry drives us around the corner, out of sight, both of us now in tears, and I say those wisest of words: “Ice cream! I need ice cream.”

C. Day-Lewis’ says it this way in his poem for his son, “Walking Away”
I have had worse partings, but none that so
gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
saying what God alone could perfectly show –
how selfhood begins with a walking away
and love is proved in the letting go.

How selfhood beings with a walking away and love is proved in the letting go. What a perfect statement of this rhythm that is embedded in our lives. Awareness of that rhythm steadies us and shapes us with the wisdom of Ecclesiastes in our spiritual practice of letting go.

~ Short piano interlude ~

2 – Receiving Gratefully and Giving Back

Steven Mitchell points to a second thing that supports me in times of letting go in his translation of Psalm 39: Unnamable God, teach us how transient we are … help me to let go of what I no longer need. You have granted me this brief existence. May I receive it gratefully and gratefully give it back.

That reminds me of my maternal grandmother, Lillian Reynolds, who was an integral part of my growing up. She showed me such unconditional love, always believing in me. Born in 1900, my grandmother had a massive stroke in August of 1977. She lived unconscious for a week in the hospital before she died; I was with her most of that time. Later, in September of that year, I wrote this poem for her.

You were gone so quickly,
without even a glimpse of its coming,
no time to share our memories
or to speak of our love.
You, who were always so easy to reach,
got locked completely inside yourself,
unreachable, unblinking, unmoving as stone.
And I, standing beside you, touching you,
ached at the distance and hated those cold machines
that kept on blinking and pushing and pumping
through your still silent body.
I will cherish all the good times and good words
that passed between us in my thirty-three years
and I will miss you – always
And I will miss so much that wonderful person
that I was for you, the granddaughter
that you saw and loved in me.

There are times when life calls us to let go of a part of our ourselves, a part of our identity. I not only loved my grandmother and mourned her loss; I also treasured who I was with her and for her. Letting go of that identity was also difficult.

This kind of identity shift happens over and again, sometimes striking us as seemingly ordinary and at other times, wrenching with anxiety or sorrow, yet also offering the possibility of meaningful growth: No longer a middle schooler, no longer living at my parents’ home, no longer a young mother, no longer a granddaughter, no longer middle-aged, no longer a daughter, no longer the minister. Who am I when I must let go of one mark, one description, of my identity? And what steadies me in those times?

When I approached retirement, I was keenly aware of the flood of emotions stirring up in me about the loss of that identity. I sought the guidance of a counselor and what I expected to be one or two sessions turned into once a month coaching for the better part of the year prior to and the year after I retired. What emerged from that coaching was crucial in supporting me in my letting go. Here are two of my learnings.
I became able to find within myself the assurance that, while I was letting go of a beloved, fulfilling, validating part of my life, I was still taking with me into retirement everything I had learned and experienced, including the essence of who I am. I realized that, just as I am still Lillian’s granddaughter in my heart, just as that young mother still lives in me, so I am still a minister in my soul.

And I was, and still am, surrounded by an overwhelming gratitude for what I was so fortunate to have, for who I was able to become. In the spirit of the Psalm, I was and am learning to gratefully give back, in order to release myself and my life for what was and is to come next.

~ Short piano interlude ~

3 – Shielding joy

I found a third support in letting go as part of an evening prayer in The Episcopal Book of Common Prayer: Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, with those who wait, with those who weep this night. Tend the sick, give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering ..… and shield the joyous.

I remembered this prayer one December day when I was writing a Christmas Eve sermon. What struck me was the phrase, “shield the joyous.” It reminded me of my then three-year-old granddaughter, Carissa, on her first Halloween trick-or-treat outing. She ran up to the door of a neighbor’s house, rang the doorbell, and then ran back with a treat in her hand, joyously proclaiming “Look, Look, what they gave me! It’s for me! For me!” She repeated this outpouring of joy at every house on the street.

“Shield the joyous,” I thought, “might be a good job description for every grandparent and every adult friend of a child.” And it is not only for children.

When Larry began his prostate cancer treatment last year, we had to let go of our summer plans, including a week with our son Chris and his family on Little Gasparilla Island and a six weeks camping adventure across the Upper Peninsula of Wisconsin and Michigan. We spent an entire day cancelling all the summer’s arrangements and then spent our summer at the Proton Center in Jacksonville, five days a week, with occasional week-ends at home. Appointments for treatment were scheduled the day before, so on Friday we heard when the treatment would be on Monday. On Monday, we learned when to be there on Tuesday, and so on through the week. These appointments would be scheduled any time between 6am and 11pm, and there was little consistency, especially at first. And the time from arrival to treatment to being finished could be anywhere from one to six hours, depending on how the machines were functioning. We had to surrender, letting go not only of the results but also letting go of planning, and instead going with the flow.

When I look back, I remember all of that, but I also remember surprising moments of joy. I was able, as James Hollis suggests, to find what remained to be lived. The images of those joyful moments are crystal clear to me: the stunning sunset overlooking the Intracoastal Waterway one evening ; the beautiful flowers in the Cummer Museum’s garden; the morning breezes on the beach; the luminesce bridges lit up at night over the St John’s River; the delicious taste of food cooked by friends; our
sons and daughters-in-law and grandchildren giving us such generous affection and intentional distractions; the kind words of the technicians and doctors; the late night comradery in the darkened waiting room with other patients; long conversations with Larry during our constant car rides in Jacksonville traffic; and of course there was also ice cream – (a recurring theme in my letting go). I especially remember one night when we left the Proton Center at almost midnight after Larry was finally done with his treatment, and we found a twenty-four-hour McDonalds where the ice cream machine actually worked, and we had the best, most joyful chocolate fudge sundaes. I shielded those moments of joy, and they shielded and steadied me as well.

Paul Tournier notes, a year after the death of his wife, that he has a great grief over her loss every day and that he also experiences in his days moments of joy.

Now don’t for a minute confuse this kind of joy with happiness. Happiness is a feeling, a wonderful feeling. It comes and goes, often attached to a particular event or outcome. Joy, I believe, is a spiritual gift that comes from deep inside, from the sweet and secret working of the Spirit in us. Joy is an attitude, a life perspective, a faith foundation that can be accessed even in the midst of stress and anxiety, loss and grief. Joy is grounded in gratitude and experienced in awareness of the wonder of life itself: joy in beauty and nature, joy in the everyday and ordinary, joy in one another.

We have ample opportunity, my friends, to experience this ordinary and extraordinary spiritual practice of letting go – with the steadying sustaining support of awareness and attention, of receiving gratefully and gratefully giving back, and of shielding joy, both in others and within ourselves.

Mary Oliver had the first word in our Call to Worship this morning. I am now giving her the last words of this sermon, from her poem “Don’t Hesitate.”

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don’t hesitate. Give in to it.
Much can never be redeemed.
Still life has some possibility left.
Perhaps joy is life’s way of fighting back,
that sometimes, something happens better
than all the riches or power in the world.
It could be anything, but …..
whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty.
Joy is not made to be a crumb.

The Spirit of God is upon us and brings us good news: to give us a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning.

Joy is not made to be a crumb. Amen.

Benediction:
In the pattern of the seasons, in the rhythm of each day,
May moments of letting go deepen your soul’s awareness,
May epiphanies of gratitude fill your heart with grace,
And may springs of joy sustain your faith and your life. Blessed be.

Sandy Reimer
May 6, 2018